Author: msb
Date: 18-01-03 04:03
I contribute to a University's FirstClass BBS system that features as one of its conferences, a 'Linux/TeX' conference (there isn't one labelled 'unix'). I'm delighted that many, many M$ users are at least dabbling with Open Source software, or are contemplating at least dual boot systems - certainly in general people are willing to give it a try alongside their Windows XtraProfit boxes.
Recently there has been a protracted thread about configuring non-ISA soundcards in linux, that has many people rushing to form a queue with advice. So here we all were tonight (15th Jan) scratching our virtual heads about how to agree on a solution.
The thing is that, as we all know, under FreeBSD at kernel build time, for most PCI cards a 'device pcm' sorts it all out nicely (in most cases!) -this has been my recent experience anyway. I'm picking on one problematic area, but you could easily subsitute XFreeSetup or whatever, for sound here.
The bottom line is/was, that I have installed a lot of linux distros from gentoo to debian to Mandrake, and all of them require *a great deal of work* for a newbie to get up and running. Not so with BSD.
My first 'make world' was achieved very successfully on a FreeBSD 4.7 box after only a month of getting used to the OS. I consider myself to be a BSD newbie! If it's good for *me*, then...
So I mentioned this tonight, and received three or four mails from interested parties asking me for further references/links et cetera.
That's even *before* I made reference to BSD ports...; )
In closing this (rather overlong) polemic - I'd just like to say here, that Mandrake Linux is *supposed* to be the easiest *nix introduction for newbies.
Hmmm.
Here's hoping those three correspondents do take the plunge to BSD - It'll be *their* success story.
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